Wertheimer

BERLIN—In a discovery that sheds new light on the infamous dictator’s last moments, historians in Berlin confirmed Friday that they had unearthed the final fundraising telegraph Hitler sent from the Führerbunker. “After unearthing the telegraph titled ‘Freunde, es ist Adolf’ and dated April 24, 1945 amongst archival files, we quickly realized that the document contained Hitler’s last-minute plea for donations amid the Red Army’s offensive into Berlin,” said German historian Hilda Bauer, adding that the fundraising message reportedly attempted to energize the Nazi base by featuring a celebrity endorsement from Leni Riefenstahl. “We now know that right up until he shot himself in the Führerbunker, Hitler continued angling for a major cash infusion by telling Germans that the next few days were ‘critical to continuing their Thousand-Year Reich,’ as well as emphasizing that the Soviets were ‘THIS CLOSE to taking Berlin unless pure-blooded Aryans act now.’ While telling Germans that his ‘one last ask’ for their 20-Reichsmark donation would help keep the Red Army out of the Reich Chancellery no doubt helped net him a few extra donations, he ultimately took his life a few days later after news outlets began calling the war for the Allies.” At press time, historians had reportedly unearthed an additional fundraising telegraph from Joseph Goebbels offering to enter donors into a raffle to grab beers with him and Martin Bormann.

Report Finds You Should Get To Retire After, Like, 6 Years Working Full-Time Job

LOS ANGELES—Calling the findings of its comprehensive survey of American workplace practices “total bullshit,” the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment issued a report Monday concluding that you should be able to retire after, like, six years of working full time. “We evaluated the data around current U.S. employment rates, and our research shows that it’s basically crazy that we have to waste our whole damn lives working before we can retire,” said report co-author Sarah Middleton, who explained that six years is actually a really long time and that it sounds like more than enough labor for one person. “Our research found that people have to work and stuff or else nothing would get done, but anything more than half a decade or so seems cruel and excessive. That has to be hundreds of hours of work, right? And after consulting with experts across the field, we determined that six years was a totally reasonable amount of time to pay your dues before you get to kick back and chill. After that long, people are so broken down they barely contribute much anyway, so this seems like a good compromise. Maybe if you’re part-time you work 10 years or something. I mean, when are people supposed to do things that they like? We heard that’s how they do it in Europe already anyway.” Middleton confirmed that the findings were based on a full-time workweek of five-hour days, four days per week.

“Being an employee of The New York Times was one of the most shameful, useless things I’ve ever done in my life,” said longtime columnist David Brooks, noting that while he had continually applied to work at The Onion over the years, he had been promptly rejected every time. “Compared to the editorial staff at The Onion, my intellectual faculties are that of a cockroach, and I wish I’d never tried to compete with what is so clearly a superior newsroom filled with brilliant, brave reporters who have a moral conviction I wholly lack.”

"My entire career has been a waste,” Brooks added. “I’ve spent decades of my life writing the most pathetic drivel here every day and never gotten a single story right.”

I pitched Mother Jones back in the day. It's in the book, but I obtained evidence that the former governor of Michigan and his top officials just deleted their phones right before the launch of the Flint criminal investigation—kind of a big deal—and they asked me, is there a Trump angle to this?

...

When I say it's a disaster, that's not to be dramatic. I'm telling you, the water is still bad. It's not as bad as it was in 2016, but you have brown water coming out, you have smelly water in many homes. Residents are showing rashes they're still getting. Residents are still losing hair. And from a just a plumbing and engineering perspective, it's common sense. Ten years later, they have not replaced all the damaged pipes. If you haven't replaced the damaged infrastructure that was badly corroded by essentially acid water, it doesn't matter if the water coming through is as clean as if Jesus blessed the water from the plant. If it's going through busted pipes, shit's going to peel off.

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With that said, the people of Flint were overjoyed to vote for Democrat Gretchen Whitmer and Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel because those two ran on Justice for Flint. Gretchen Whitmer ran on opening up the water stations that the Republican governor had shut down. That's where the residents got free water. The Attorney General said that the investigation before her was basically incompetent. Well, my reporting shows she fired those prosecutors. They were building a case against the Republican governor for involuntary manslaughter. You mentioned murder. They were building a case against a governor—this would have been a historic event for involuntary manslaughter, because he knew about the deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak and did not notify the public. She fired them, and she sabotaged the investigation, I believe, so they couldn’t follow the money.

But the bottom line is, Republicans caused this, and Democrats, it seems, are helping to sweep it under the rug.

A metaphor that I've been using in Covid arguments with types is that the Republicans may have poisoned the well, but the Democrats are still insisting that we drink from that poisoned well. I forgot it's not always a metaphor!

https://theonion.com/hurripain-in-the-ass/

Algorithms can be employed to sniff out desperation for income based on the extremes people are willing to take on the job, such as high trip acceptance rates among Uber drivers. With this hoard of granular information, A.I. can calculate the lowest possible pay that workers across sectors will tolerate and suggest incentives like bonuses to control their behavior. While bosses have always offered so-called variable pay—for instance, paying more for night shifts or offering performance-based salary boosts—high-tech surveillance coupled with A.I. is taking real-time tailored wages to new extremes.

“Now you have machine learning trained on identifying the desperation index of workers,” Zephyr Teachout, a professor of law at Fordham University, told me. “When you move to the formal employment context, there is every reason to think that employers who can would be interested in tailoring their wages and using behavioral data.”

The clearest parallels can be drawn in other independent contractor roles, which make up around 15 percent of U.S. workers. Dubal has found that independent contractors working with Instacart and Amazon are similarly surveilled and receive personalized pay based on information including the times of day and length of time they work, along with the types of tasks they’re willing to accept.

Jeanne Marrazzo, new leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, everyone:

Can I make a quick digression? We recently had a long Covid [research] meeting where we had about 200 people, in person. And we can’t mandate mask-wearing, because it’s federal property. But there was a fair amount of disturbance that we couldn’t, and people weren’t wearing masks, and one person accused us of committing a microaggression by not wearing masks.

And I take that very seriously. But I thought to myself, it’s more that people just want to live a normal life. We really don’t want to go back. It was so painful. We’re still all traumatized. Let’s be honest about that. None of us are over it.

So there’s not a lot of appetite for raising an alarm, especially if it could be perceived subsequently as a false alarm.

Edit - thanks for the help in bypassing the paywall.

Dear centrist friend,

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

Your pal,

Wertheimer

P.S. Read Settlers.

https://theonion.com/my-way-or-the-fairway/

I guess this is Dorf?

Montgomery’s situation is only one of many across California, and the nation writ large, in which an individual’s health is in jeopardy as a result of the machinations of a little-known species of health care corporation: pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).

Ostensibly, as their lobbyists contend, the role of PBMs is to bargain with drug manufacturers for discounts and rebates, then furnish the drugs to insurance plans and pharmacies while passing on the negotiated savings — and taking a cut for themselves. PBMs also determine an insurance plan’s “formulary,” i.e. the medications made available to people on a certain plan. The reality is that PBMs, far from mitigating drug costs, leverage their middleman position to dictate the price and availability of prescription medicines, extracting fees and engineering transactions to their advantage. At the end of the chain, adverse financial and health effects are inflicted on everyday people.

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California has long been notable for its comparatively lax regulatory stance towards PBMs — a gap that state lawmakers had planned to address when, in late August, they passed Senate Bill 966. The bill was coauthored by Democratic State Senators Scott Wiener and Aisha Wahab and backed by a coalition of professional associations and patient rights advocates, including the California Pharmacists Association, the National Community Pharmacists Association and Unite for Safe Medications. SB 966 would have instituted the first medical licensing requirements on PBM operations in the state and bolstered transparency and accountability measures. Passed in the State Senate with resounding bipartisan assent, it then went to the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom — who, just as advocates had feared, vetoed it.

I owe them a painful, chronic condition.